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Thursday, 25 May 2017

Largest Lexus Dealership in the World Moves to Negotiation-Free Pricing

The largest Lexus dealership in the world will be adopting negotiation-free pricing — JM Lexus in Florida has joined the Lexus Plus program, and will apply fixed pricing to new and used vehicles. From Kelley Blue Book :

Jim Dunn, vice president and general manager at JM Lexus, said Lexus Plus is about improving the customer experience. Dunne said the intent for adopting Lexus Plus is to be “the very, very best dealership in the way we treat our customers. Being No. 1 now to us is no longer enough. We want to raise the bar and that’s the right thing to do.”

Dunn believes once Lexus Plus is fully operational at the dealership, the time it takes for a transaction to be conducted will be chopped from about 3.5 hours today to 1.5 to 2 hours in the future. The dealership has just started to transition to Lexus Plus, a transition that could take six to 12 months to fully implement across all departments.

“People are backed up. I mean they could be here for 5 hours,” Dunn said. “I hear customers say they rather do something else than go through the process of buying a car. We are listening to that now. It is important that we respect their time. Time is a customer’s most important asset. It is time for us [as dealers] to respect that.”

Lexus Plus, which seeks to revamp the luxury dealership experience with the promise of fixed, transparent pricing and a single point of contact with customers, started with 11 dealers volunteering for the first wave last year. One dealership dropped out after being sold, and three others joined this year.

That leaves 13 stores in the program out of 237 nationwide.

That sounds low, but Kitzens says the slow uptake is understandable. After all, he says, Lexus Plus isn’t designed to be an experiment where dealers jump in and out. It represents a fundamental shift in how dealers interact with customers.

“It’s one of these things where you’ve really got to burn the ship,” Kitzens told Automotive News. “You’re not going back, and if you’ve got personnel that are used to doing business very traditionally, they may not fit into the Lexus Plus process.”